As an increasing number of applications and services are being made available over networks such as the Internet, an increasing number of content, application, and/or service providers are turning to technologies such as cloud computing. Cloud computing, in general, is an approach to providing access to electronic resources through services, such as Web services, where the hardware and/or software used to support those services is dynamically scalable to meet the needs of the services at any given time. A user or customer typically will rent, lease, or otherwise pay for access to resources through the cloud, and thus does not have to purchase and maintain the hardware and/or software to provide access to these resources.
Customers often need to modify the set of users granted access to a data source, such as where employees or other users are added, deleted, or obtain different access or responsibilities. In conventional systems, users and user access parameters are manually adjusted by a database administrator (DBA) or other such user. The adjustment of the native users of the data source typically affects the availability of the data source for a period of time, as the data source must be taken down to adjust user information for the data source. Such a process is not only time consuming and expensive, but requires periodic outages of the data source.